PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; A Strong, Silent Gaze, No Matter What

''Picturing Guatemala: Images From the Cirma Photography Archive, 1870-1997'' at the Americas Society is an exhibition whose power is quietly but insistently felt. It is a power found in a people who appear to have survived years of repression and civil war scarred but intact: an eloquence that is also unveiled in the images of Luis Gonzalez Palma, Guatemala's foremost photographer, whose work of the last 10 years is at Throckmorton Fine Art.

The 100 or so images in ''Picturing Guatemala'' are culled from the extensive photographic archive of Cirma (Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamerica), a nonprofit organization founded in 1979 in Antigua, Guatemala. Among the collection's rarities is one of the few extant albums of Eadweard Muybridge's trip to Central America in the 1870's.

Wall texts here are taciturn. The black-and-white images are neither sensational nor, with the exception of Muybridge, taken by widely known photographers. The subjects, in fact, lean toward what would be ordinary in most places (landscapes, studio portraits, street scenes, politicians campaigning) and what has become ordinary in many parts of Latin America (a soldier executed, peasants rounded up, children in a refugee camp). But anyone prepared to mine the subtle riches on display will find much that is rewarding.

In the 1940's Tomas Zanotti, an Italian, took some delightfully off-kilter old-fashioned studio portraits of Mayan families. His props included fussy Victorian side tables and fancy painted backdrops, and he often placed realistic-looking plaster-of-Paris dogs at his clients' feet. In these portraits, Zanotti seemed to view his less-than-affluent clientele with respect and affection. The props may be outlandishly foreign, the Mayans may be barefoot or wear scruffy clothes or adopt too stiff a pose, but the men, women and children looking at the camera project a lovely, dignified sense of self.

A mysterious gentleman posing in front of a European backdrop, wearing a pith helmet and a Japanese kimono, is identified as ''Juan Jose de Jesus Yas: Self-Portrait 1900.'' According to the catalog published by Cirma, Yas was the first Japanese to emigrate to Central America. By the mid-1860's, commercial photography was thriving in Japan, and Yas's studio portraits in Guatemala at the turn of the 19th century reflected that tradition. One of his studio portraits is of three strikingly handsome women. Yas also made an unusual portrait: a triple exposure in a single negative, showing the same man in three poses, as though he were part of a triplet.

Yas's nephew, Jose Domingo Noriega, was the superior portraitist. He could take a portrait of an elderly couple -- the lines on their faces mirroring the lines on the gnarled hands resting peaceably on their laps -- and catch an identically transcendent, slight smile on their faces. Noriega also took an incandescent picture of a woman in a butterfly costume, her arms spread wide, a wary look on her face.

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This photograph, as well as the majestic portrait by the Guatemalan photographer Alberto G. Valdeavellano of a Mayan woman from Mixco (circa 1895), foreshadows the work at Throckmorton by Mr. Gonzalez Palma, who often puts wings on the people in his images -- people notable for their strong, silent gaze. But it is a pair of so-called funerary portraits, taken by the Yas-Noriega Studio, that bring Mr. Gonzalez Palma's images vividly to mind.

Here, women are shrouded in black and look on the face of death without weeping. A girl of perhaps 8 or 9, standing by a dead infant who appears to be sleeping, gazes at the camera. Her look of mournful stoicism is also found in Mr. Gonzalez Palma's ''Portrait of a Boy'' (1990) at Throckmorton. On the boy's head is a crown of thorns.

Born in 1957, Mr. Gonzalez Palma has lived through his country's 36 years of civil war, the longest in Latin America, which began in 1960 and ended in late 1996. If the Cirma photo collection aims to be Guatemala's visual memory, Mr. Gonzalez Palma's work can be said to serve as a portrait of his country's tormented soul. Instead of reworking images of Guatemalans as faceless suffering masses, Mr. Gonzalez Palma has chosen to focus on individual faces, which he shows with the tenderness Julia Margaret Cameron gave her portraits. He then superimposes on these faces the raw theater of suffering, mixing the emotional symbols of Roman Catholicism with those of Mayan myths familiar to the majority of Guatemalans, who are Mayan or of Mayan and Spanish descent. (A book of his images, ''Luis Gonzalez Palma: Poems of Sorrow,'' was published last year by Arena Editions.)

Mr. Gonzalez Palma's pictures, which are sometimes ripped and pasted together, in the manner of Mike and Doug Starn's early work, have a rich ocher overlay, which allows him to accentuate his subject's eyes by leaving the area around the pupil an arresting, bleak white. Even when a comely and unsmiling young woman is wearing a crown of roses, as she does in ''The Hidden Rose'' (1995), she might as well be wearing a crown of thorns.